A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries | Hacker News Reader

A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

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212 pointsDamienSF174 comments

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I think the most interesting (and perhaps hopeful) aspect here is that people now have an expectation of fairness in the selection of party candidates. That's a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, I think people widely assumed that the party was biased towards individual candidates. Even now, that's clearly the case when the sitting President is a candidate. I personally think that expecting an unbiased party structure is unrealistic, given the very nature of the organization. The party doesn't have a product, other than its opinion. The idea that an organization of partisans only arrives at that collective opinion through primaries and caucuses seems quite naive to me.

To me there is an unquestioned premise to the article: why should the state [as in "government"] conduct elections on behalf of political parties. Enrolling voters as Democrat or Republican or whatever and then restricting the voter's access to ballot items based upon that enrollment [or non-enrollment] does not seem to be the business of the government.

A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses. It is free to nullify the decision of those voting in a particular primary. A political party is free to nominate whomever it chooses [and almost certainly multiple candidates for the same office it wishes should it choose].

Ultimately the party, not a judge, chooses whose vote matters and whose doesn't. Placing the imprimatur of the state upon a political party's process doesn't change that or make the process of candidate nomination little 'd' democratic. The people within a political party charged with making the rules for candidate selection are not elected or selected little 'd' democratically. The process of nominating candidates is not little 'd' democratic in any meaningful sense.

A political party is free to change the rules for nominating candidates however and whenever it chooses.

This is something we should take away from them. The outcomes of private party activities shouldn't have any impact on the names that appear on ballots. They can maybe mark the names they choose to endorse as an organization, but we should throw away the system where the parties are directly involved in putting names on the ballot (of course they'd be indirectly involved, as an organized group is, uh, organized and thus more ready to act together, so would have an easy time dealing with ballot petitions).

There are many barriers to entry to get a name on the ballot, and political parties will rally together to help jump through those hoops to get specific names on. If there were lower barriers to entry, the ballots would be flooded.

I think the barriers to entry should likely remain high, but we need an overhaul of the voting system itself to break the two-party system, which itself is just a side-effect of the mechanics of our voting process, not anything mandated.

If I remember correctly, early on in the country's history the founders noticed that the mechanics of voting were trending towards a limited two-party system, and that consternated them. Most every (if not actually every) democracy established after the USA has a voting style and representative bodies that allows more parties to coexist, or creative destruction within the set of active parties to thrive.

Why is having lots of names on the ballot a bad thing?

I'd rather have some system of arbitrarily limiting the number of names on the ballot than a system that privileges parties. For instance, for statewide elections you could choose the 5 (or 10!) names that had satisfied the ballot requirements in the most voting districts (so it doesn't matter that Uncle Larry likes to "run" for state senate in his home county, he doesn't kick someone with a better/actual shot at winning off).

There are 1,862 candidates for President right now [0]. The 5 or 10 candidates you will see on the ballot in your statewide election for President are those that have satisfied the ballot requirements in the state.

It turns out that satisfying the ballot requirements is already a challenge requiring organization, and that organization is called a political party.

[0] http://www.fec.gov/data/CandidateSummary.do

Yes, but in many jurisdictions the rules are simpler for the parties than for some rando. That's my objection. The rando shouldn't have a higher bar than the established organization, they should have the same bar. Partly for the reason you highlight, backing of a party already makes it significantly more likely that someone will succeed in getting on many ballots.

What problem is lowering the barrier to entry for the balloting process solving? If someone has broad and genuine support, they will be able to either apply their own resources or raise funds to completing the paperwork necessary to get on the ballot. Party-supported or not, registration is a relatively small investment of time, compared to what it will take to mount a successful campaign.

The public has a vested interest in having a ballot present only those candidates who can demonstrate a minimum-level of popular support. Otherwise why have a qualification process at all -- we can give voters phonebooks to take with them into the booth, and they can find the name of whichever citizen they feel should be elected.

Every carve-out or differential treatment for established political parties is a barrier to the establishment of new political parties.

So the political parties have become these weird, permanent, pseudo-governmental entities that no longer have consistent identities of their own, but are basically available for capture every 4 years.

That's how you get the "Republican Party platform" doing a full reversal on trade policy, international policy, health care, and a dozen other issues between 2012 and now.

The "Republican Party" today is just a shell--a collection of structural advantages that the Trump folks have won the the right to put on like a costume. Same with the Democratic party--Sanders just failed to win the costume.

What we need, is to regularly reset the requirements for political organizations, so that it's just as easy for new candidates to be supported by new organizations, as old parties.

It's the parties that have already have a lower barrier. My argument is that we should put them on equal footing with everyone else.

What you are describing is already more-or-less the system we have. You don't need to be nominated by any political party to run for office or have your name printed on a ballot.

The rules for parties are often easier. My argument is that they shouldn't be.

I also don't like that a party could literally pick a name out of hat to designate their presidential candidate. Of course it would be terrible for a party itself to do that, but the system is setup so that name would end up on an awful lot of ballots.

Which is why in California certain races are top-two win. For example in the "primaries" two democrats were the top-two vote getters, so the general election ballot will only have democrats on it.

Why does it seem that we in America can only count to two during election season? Or, less facetiously, what keeps us fixated on the polarizing, binary approach to elections, even in cases where first-past-the-post isn't strictly followed (as in California's first-two-past-the-post case)?

Whenever people talk about alternative voting systems, the consensus seems to be that it would be impossible to implement in the US. But why? What drives this obsession with choosing between two evils rather than choosing among several, where one's own views might stand a better chance?

It has a lot to do with access to mass exposure by the candidates. The reason why Bernie had his message heard by so many is because he participated in debates covered by mainstream media through his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Third-party candidates don't gain this type of exposure during their primaries as the media don't cover their selection process.

Theoretically third-party candidates could gain exposure through the General Election debate however, the Commission on Presidential Debates which organize the debate makes it very difficult for a third-party candidate to be eligible to the debate. Indeed candidates need "a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations" as defined by the CPD.

You may then wonder who is the CPD? The CPD is a PRIVATE organization financed with PRIVATE money. They claim to be nonpartisan even though it is governed by former chairmen of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee. No wonder why they don't want to open the door to third-party candidates...

The state I'm in can only count to one for some offices. I spend a lot of time writing people in for the uncontested races.

But with regard to your question, the obvious explanation is that the voting method itself acts as a game theory attractor for a certain number of "viable" candidates, until a Nash equilibrium is reached. First-past-the-post thus eventually results in an entrenched two-party system.

This alone is ample reason for those two parties to resist any change to the voting method. Anything else might undermine their duopoly.

First-past-the-post thus eventually results in an entrenched two-party system.

Indeed, and I like this set of visualizations to demonstrate that: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim

This alone is ample reason for those two parties to resist any change to the voting method. Anything else might undermine their duopoly.

So we know why the major parties would oppose voting system change. Is there something beyond the parties' word that keeps non-partisan members of the public from wanting to change voting systems?

> So we know why the major parties would oppose voting system change. Is there something beyond the parties' word that keeps non-partisan members of the public from wanting to change voting systems?

Members of the public who want voting system change end up with members of the parties proposing superficial changes to relieve that demand that pose no or minimal challenge to the partisan duopoly, like nonpartisan redistricting (adopted in several states), California's top-two primary system, term limits (adopted in lots of states), tweaks to election scheduling, ballot access rules, etc.

> I spend a lot of time writing people in

In some states (like California) write-in candidates also have to register and qualify, and writing in a non-qualified write-in candidate is for all purposes (except the workload for vote counters) identical to blank ballot -- even if through some fluke of coordinate protest they received a majority of cast ballots, it would just show up in the counts as a very low number of valid ballots cast.

Just FYI, but your local vote counters hate you. I've done it before and write ins are a pain. If you know people who want to hold office, why are you writing then in instead of getting them on the ballot?

It is for the same reason that I do not visit the beach and attempt to hold back the tides with my hands.

You cannot get elected here as a third-party or independent. Period. If you had a notion to buy your way in, it would be cheaper to pay off the second-place major party to run you as their candidate than to run in your own right. The only place you will ever see a third party on the ballots here is the line for presidential electors.

And for a variety of reasons, in a manner similar to Comcast and Time Warner, the two major parties often choose to not compete in certain areas, to the ultimate detriment of the residents. I write in because when I see only one name on the ballot, that is a mockery of democracy.

If the vote counters hate me, that is exactly what I want. I hate how they support a system that pretends to be democratic.

I'm going to be completely blunt - have you actually tried to get someone on the ballot? My experience of uncontested elections is that there simply is only one person in town who wants to be library secretary. Maybe your location is different, but uncontested where I'm from is a matter of indifference not some conspiratorial collusions.

What is your evidence that they choose not to compete? Competing costs almost nothing if someone wants the job and enough people fill out single party ballots that they'd have a good chance.

I'm disappointed that you choose your protest method to be inconveniencing local volunteers in a manner that is even less likely to achieve results than something you compare to holding back the tide.

I got as far as the research. This is not an issue of "library secretary", either. These are state and county offices.

To run for a county office, such as Sheriff, Coroner, Treasurer, Commissioner/Constable, or School Board, as an independent, I would need 5000 verified signatures. To list a party affiliation, I would need about 36000. Based on the experience of the Libertarian Party in 2015, I might face a 60% rejection rate for signatures, meaning I would need to collect 12500, costing roughly $25000.

To keep my party listed as a "qualified party" for the next election, it would need 20% (!) of the votes cast in a statewide race.

The major parties do not need to collect that many signatures, which gives an innate funding advantage for campaigning.

And you might expect that the other major party might not run an opposition candidate for Sheriff in a county where the incumbents are heavily favored every election, but how about allowing the candidate for U.S. Senate to run unopposed? [0] What about three of the seven districts for House of Representatives? [1]

I don't tilt at windmills.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_... : "An independent candidate would have been able to challenge Sessions if at least 44,828 signatures had been submitted by June 3, 2014."

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_House_of_Representativ... : Districts 4 and 7 were completely unopposed; district 5 had only an independent challenger.

I think the implication is that getting them on the ballot might not be possible due to the local ballot requirements. The hope might be that the pain suffered by vote counters like yourself sends a clearer message to the local establishment than an abstention.

I'm not local establishment and the message I've learned is to vote for the uncontested parties so that there is no chance an accidental third party gets elected.

Political parties are free to make their own rules to the extent that they comply with election law and the National Voters Right Act. The report points out many instances in which election officials broke the law.

Now a party may still decide to run its internal elections like a banana republic but in that case, this party should certainly not be named the Democratic party...

Considering the structural barriers preventing third parties from ever gaining a foothold, it's probably a good idea to legislate a basic standard of democracy for what happens inside the parties – kinda like antitrust rules.

I don't really understand the outrage. The parties are not part of the government, they aren't held to the same requirements for fairness. The caucuses of the parties are supposed to help them gauge the public perception of their candidates, to help them make a better decision as to which candidate is most likely to win the presidential election. In fact, I expect each party to be biased towards a certain candidate. I expect the party to come together to back the strongest candidate to prevent any possible party fractures. Just look at what happened this time, maybe if the Democrats had gone full-force behind Clinton from the beginning Sanders wouldn't have supporters protesting outside the convention for his very party. Maybe I'm wrong here but I never expected either party to go above and beyond what's required of them and act like they are part of the government.

They do receive funding from the government though, which comes from taxpayers. Also, the DNC's rules specifically ban bias towards a candidate in the primaries.

One obvious issue is that taxpayers money goes to holding these elections. This seems ridiculous.

Election officials still need to respect election law and the National Voters Right Act which hasn't been the case in many instances according to the report.

Interesting. My take on it is that most people have never paid much attention to the details how candidates are chosen and know they're going to vote with their party anyway or will wait until November to decide on their 'lesser of two evils'. They just never knew how it worked, and probably never expected a voice in the matter. I certainly never paid much attention to this stuff. I would sometimes follow primary candidates and maybe watch a debate or two, but all this stuff about delegates and super delegates etc. was not a thing until this year. This feels like it is quite possibly the longest span a presidential election has held the attention of the voting public. And we've still got quite some time to go.

I think this is right. We don't notice when things run smoothly, only when they go awry. Of course, if you want dramatic political change, "running smoothly" isn't what you're looking for. This nomination was unusual because: a) the nominee in this case wasn't the President or VP, which usually dampens any rival campaign before it gets started; b) the nominee was nonetheless more or less widely regarded as "next in line" in a way usually reserved for the VP; c) the nominee had unusually high negatives; and d) an Independent 'crashed' the Democratic party, bringing a lot of non-party voters with no vested interest in the existing party hierarchy. Had any one of these conditions been different, I don't think we would've seen the same degree of discord.

I am not sure how the findings of this report can reinforce the expectation of fairness in the selection process. The reports points out to evidences of various election fraud tactics (voter suppression, registration tampering, illegal voter purging and fraudulent voting machine tallies) which have been carried out to eventually influence the outcome of the election.

Also, I wonder how can the Democratic party can still be credible in denouncing Republicans efforts to suppress voters the right to vote when employing the exact same tactics during the primaries.

The point is that people went to a lot of trouble to study bias in a process that in the past was widely just assumed to be biased. In this case, it's unlikely that the bias affected the overall outcome---Sanders lost by a large margin in the biggest states, a deficit that would be hard to overcome---but I think it does indicate a shift in how people view the parties.

The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution. Voting for a party nominee is a privilege, and if the party chose to limit the voting pool to party officials only, they could do so without violating anyone's rights. Bernie is free to run as an independent, and his supporters are free to vote for him. If the DNC somehow interfered with that, they would be doing what Republicans are accused of doing with the Voter ID laws.

>The criticisms of hypocrisy are fair, but only go so far. If they violated rules, they were rules of their own making, and not rights granted by the Constitution.

That's like saying, "Lying is only a crime when you're under oath. Ergo, the party leaders are free to lie all they want and no harm, no foul."

Lying is only a crime when it's under oath. Hypocrisy is bad, too, but it's not illegal. And party leaders are free (in the legal sense) to lie all they want, though if they want continued political support it's probably a poor strategy.

Before we are too quick to call on the law to support our side, consider what happens when that same law is used against us by our opponents. Right now you may want DNC leaders in jail, but I think it would set a terrible precedent for private political activities to result in imprisonment, regardless of our distaste for them. Again, the situation is very different when peoples' Constitutional voting rights are denied (eg, voting in a real election). Then by all means, legal action should be taken.

I skimmed the beginning and end of 95 page report, but its recommendations were pretty good:

1) Exclusive use of hand-counted paper ballots in all future US elections.

2) Automatic voter registration, with same-day party affiliation switching as a mandatory condition for all elections that are publicly funded.

3) Restoration of voting rights legislation which would ensure adequate access to polling sites.

So it's cool: no jail time for anybody, just better preventative measures.

If the Democrats want me to ever vote for them, then they have to do better than lame excuses like "we're a private party and voting for a nominee is a privilege". Sorry, I don't vote for hypocrites, nor do I support corruption.

I think that OPs point was that previously reports like this would have been met with a "Well duh. Of course that is what happens. Primaries aren't fair elections."

Where as now we are starting to see reports like this be taken seriously because there is a background expectation that primaries are conducted fairly. There is certainly acknowledgement that the current system isn't entirely fair. The change is that an strong desire for fairness now exists where previously it did not.

I'd be cautious of this report. This is an American politics advocacy organization. Not to say that this report is incorrect per se, it may be 100% right. But it also may be anything else, ranging from wildly exaggerated to outright wrong. It's very difficult to find sober, factual information in the national American political scene.

I looked up one of the referenced incidents -- the botched poll in Arizona -- and based on other articles (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/ar...) it's hard to tell from a bird's eye perspective whether even that was "rigged".. or whether it was mere "incompetence".

I know FiveThirtyEight, referenced several times in the paper, (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-a...) lean against the "rigged" argument, which is where I stand from a big picture perspective. Political shenanigans always happen, but regardless of this, demographics explain the result of the Democratic primary more than anything else. (That being said, in my opinion, the same demographics should frankly tell the Democratic Party to handle the Sanders supporters much better than they have been so far.)

I think this comment lowers the quality of the discussion. The comment asks us not take an exhaustively prepared article seriously without providing any evidence.

It's as though the comment is trying to prevent overracting, however weigh it against the threat of underreacting. The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid (extra research time). The harm in taking these allegations not-seriously-enough (false negative) is mass-scale election fraud.

Given how hard it is for such allegations to even be considered at all in our social climate (even when we all know they're much more technically feasible than people would like to admit) I think a defusing this article detracts from pursuit of truth in exchange for peace of mind.

> The harm in taking these allegations too seriously (false positive) is doing research and finding out the statistics are invalid

That's one possible harm, but I think it's also possible that people will take the allegations too seriously and withdraw from the political process entirely. One of the paradoxes of modern political life is that the elections that get the most attention aren't necessarily the ones with the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives. If you don't show up to the polls in November because {Clinton,Trump,Satan} will win anyways because of the rigged system, then you won't vote for mayor, school board, and local bond measures that can much more directly affect the policing policies in your town, the education your kids get, and the transportation infrastructure to get to your places of work or leisure.

The difference a few individual voters can make in local elections is certainly huge. Over time I've seen multiple initiatives and candidates I liked or disliked decided on only a handful of votes.

However, I don't think this is a sufficient argument to motivate people who would refuse to vote because of the state of the presidential election. I think they would feel that local educational or policing policies are insignificant in comparison to the big-picture changes they now have no say in because their favored candidate was eliminated by corrupt party and media practices. They might still feel that they will be more affected by the year-to-year impact of foreign policy and trade policy than the day-to-day impact of a .1% chance increase of getting a bogus traffic ticket.

Apologize for not referencing more evidence for the counterview.

So let me bring up some exhaustively prepared articles from the past. A lot of these are from the late 2000s when the "voter ID" issue was in play, but I do not think the electoral landscape has changed that much since then.

A report on voter fraud in 2007 from the Brennan Center concluded a very low rate of voter fraud in 2004. http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%...

News21 (part of the Carnegie Knight media initiative) created a database of voter fraud. They found little. http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/

We have this Washington Post reporter who tracked voter fraud, and found little. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...

And... another paper on how "voter fraud is in the eye of the beholder." (Harvard Law Review) http://www.harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/anso...

So... that's a lot of data (I could link many more reports from this era) that indicates that, frankly, voter fraud from any angle really hasn't been a big issue before (and that any perception may be due to political bias, perhaps). I do believe there's plenty of inefficiencies regarding the American electoral process, and that might be right ("inaccurate, costly, and inefficient" as the Pew Center on the States alleged in 2012, that I buy -- http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...). But there's a difference between incompetence and awful systems, and outright fraud.

I must acknowledge that this isn't the only paper alleging fraud in the 2016 primaries (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6mLpCEIGEYGYl9RZWFRcmpsZk0...). I will note however that, for this one, Snopes was skeptical in that the numbers had not been peer reviewed by independent parties (http://www.snopes.com/stanford-study-proves-election-fraud-t...) and note counter-viewpoints ala Joshua Holland of The Nation (who does not think much of "exit poll conspiracies": https://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspir...)

This is why I'm very cautious. Bias is huge in politics; it may be exhaustively prepared, but if they are using bunk statistics, it's not worth much.

The debate around exit polls will only be settled with the publication of raw data by Edison Media Research. With so much polemic on the topic you would think that it would be in their interest to make these data public if they had nothing to hide. This isn't even a new issue. Exit polls data transparency was already the object of a debate during the 2004 Presidential Elections: http://electiondefensealliance.org/frequently_asked_question...

On one hand, we have an electronic vote count which can't be verified and on the other, we have raw exit polls data that are kept secret. What kind of Democracy is that??? Isn't transparency one of the most fundamental principal in a Democracy?

The American election process isn't transparent at all... How can we claim our elections to be democratic?

What are you talking about? Those articles are generic studies about past elections, there's no theoretical way those studies could have found whether or not there was an issue in the 2016 election.

It's okay to take back something you said in error in HN, you don't always have to double-down.

I don't think it's in error or "doubling-down" to wait for the "peer review", which is all I'm asking. :)

If it's not clear, I'm not saying that the paper is wrong per se.

There are ongoing lawsuits relating to this where many people of varied interests are going to be pouring over this, and other data, way more than I can at the moment.

If the results of the lawsuits validate this paper, then this paper is important.

But it's also possible that the lawsuits will not be successful.

Historically most claims of voter fraud have been wildly exaggerated, which is why I bring up the past. Including the fact that bias unfortunately colored many fraud claims in the past.

Maybe it's different this time. Maybe not. We'll see.

The authors of this report can be taken seriously as they put their professional reputation on the line. I am not sure that Fritz Scheuren, professor of statistics at George Washington University and the 100th President of the American Statistical Association (ASA), would risk his reputation by making statements we can't defend. Here is what he says: “as a statistician, I find the results of the 2016 primary voting unusual. In fact, I found the patterns unexpected [and even] suspicious. There is a greater degree of smoothness in the outcomes than the roughness that is typical in raw/real data.”

Yeah both these things are true. A lot of comments in this thread are about how an expectation of fairness at the party level is too much to ask for, and that's fine, but fraud and voter suppression are a whole different level. If it's happening here it's going to happen in the general election too.

Waxing political I wonder if Trump will be able to build an infrastructure to hack/disenfranchise as many people as Clinton will since he's not as firmly inserted into the political machine. In other words elections of the future won't be settled by how many votes a candidate wins but by how many votes a candidate steals. Gives a whole new meaning to "Candidate A has locked in the [insert demographic here] vote."

I'm sympathetic, but without a parliamentary system the US cannot have an effective market of political parties. And without such a market, primaries need to be democratic.

I'm not sure a parliamentary system is necessary. Instead, I think we need to make three reforms:

- non-partisan redistricting

- instant runoff voting

- automatic voter registration

Is instant runoff like ranked choice?

It's not the issue that there are inputs other than the wishes of the delegates, it's that those other inputs almost totally override the delegates and make the whole thing a sham.

As it is, the only purpose the delegates have is to fool people into believing in the result.

I think this story does not need to be flagged, but could benefit from a very constrained discussion ('self-censoring') to not let personal political opinions take over the discussion. I'll try.

Is this a direction more modern, western democracies seem to be heading? I feel a loss of democratic appeal and subsequent machinations of all kinds by apparatuses of state to keep in power. Democratic in name, but the number of options available to the public limited to what is in line with what public officials think of as good sense.

Examples:

-DNC machinating to get Clinton elected as candidate. The public needed Russia (!) for a fresh dosis of unpopular truths about those machinations. This documents more evidence on machinations.

-The unpopular and undemocratic European Union. Examples abound. The best being the EU-constitution: struck down in popular referendums, flown in as a treaty.

-In my country, the Netherlands, a referendum in which the public voted against an EU-agreement with Ukraine (wholy within law, with very obvious machinations by state and political parties), on which both the government and EU reneged

Counter example:

-Brexit

Disclaimers

-Please, don't hit on the 'red herrings' (if any), like 'undemocratic EU'. I see it as both a fact (imho, populus does not recognize European parliament) and an opinion (mostly in the more populist parties over Europe). Not center to my view of democracies limiting decision power of the populus. -The 'public officials' need not be those paid by the state. But more broadly: those aspiring to have their organisations have a say over public policy.

Since you are Dutch, here's a wonderful act of public service done by your countrymen, getting voting machines to play chess: http://hackaday.com/2006/10/06/voting-machine-chess/

My country, Ireland, briefly flirted with the idea of voting machines areound the same time, and decided to scrap them at enormous expense and go back to paper ballots: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/opposition-condemns-e-voting-...

> The public needed Russia (!) for a fresh dosis of unpopular truths about those machinations. This documents more evidence on machinations.

I'm not convinced the "Russian hackers" angle is correct, it seems like a convenient cover story for the DNC, to draw a distinction between Hillary and Trump with regard to Putin. They know many older voters don't understand this stuff (no offense to older HN readers!) and will likely buy it. It's just like the North Korean hackers story for the Sony hack. It could just as easily have been disgruntled DNC insiders, and Wikileaks is happy to have the real source of the leak disguised.

It is very clear to anyone who wants to look into it that Russia is the culprit. There were two attackers; one used the same tradecraft, malware, and command-and-control servers as the Sofacy group, [0] which we have known to be Russian intelligence over dozens of large attacks all the way back to 2007. The other attacker used the same tradecraft, malware, and command-and-control servers as the "Cozy" group [1] which we know less about but reuses the same technology as other Russian intelligence actors and attacks Russian targets. As far as perpetrators, we definitely have the right people.

Motive is less clear. In reality, they probably hacked the DNC because everybody hacks everybody; that's the reality of modern cyberespionage. America hacks the Russian political parties, they hack us back. But this time someone screwed up and they got caught, so now we need a cover story.

The coverstory of trying to manipulate the election is basically convenient for all involved. It is far fetched enough to sound unbelievable, so it provides diplomatic cover. It also provides cover for why there's no similar story at the RNC, which is better than admitting either the Russians couldn't do it, or they could and they got away with that one. It provides cover to Clinton who can now claim the Russians want to elect Trump so please focus on that instead of anything to do with email, and it provides cover to Trump who would like to keep the word email in the news. This is the story that all our characters are happy to go with.

But the Russians being the perpetrators? That part is definitely true. There is way too much evidence over way too many years. The DNC did not create a Russian intelligence organization in 2007 in order to cover up their email leak in this election.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofacy_Group

[1] http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/36195/cyber-crime/cozydu...

The attribution of the DNC hack to a Russian APT group has some backing from security professionals. Crowd Strike, based on analysis of the malware used, came to this conclusion (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...). This conclusion has been corroborated by Fidelis (http://www.threatgeek.com/2016/06/dnc_update.html) and Threat Connect (https://www.threatconnect.com/tapping-into-democratic-nation...). It's early days, but the evidence is there.

FYI, the Sony hack was very likely not committed by an insider (https://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016...). DISCLAIMER: I worked with the team who did operation blockbuster.

Why assume 'disgruntled' insiders when the established forces are the ones profiting from the hack? Or are you saying that they did it because Sanders would never have gotten through national convention anyways, but they could hurt Hillary by blackening her?

I'm not assuming anything, I'm saying it's a possibility. The Russian hacker story just seems bizarre and made up, just like the Sony North Korea story.

Here's an interview with Julian Assange when asked about the source of the leaks, with direct quotes from Clinton's campaign manager, quoting unnamed experts: https://youtu.be/axuJfX3cO9Q?t=12m50s

"On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-r...

I mean anyone can quote anonymous "experts" to craft a narrative. Doesn't make it true.

My point is, at some point you have to assume that the easiest way of all this happening is that either DNC or Hillary's staff is rotten from the top. At this point it seems to be a pattern to me.

It may just be the local reflection of the major conflict of our times: liberal democracies vs. authoritarian capitalism.

We actually got lucky during the cold war in that the other side was fundamentally quite stupid and bound to lose their power from a lack of economic performance.

Now there's a new crop of autocrats freed from the constraints of ideology. It appears that democracy isn't actually necessary for economic development and they're raising a crop of apolitical hedonists – well-fed, entertained an thoroughly harmless for their grip on power. When a bit more loyalty is needed, a little round of in-group -> out-group hatred usually fixes it.

China, Russia, Turkey, Victor Orban, and now Donald Trump: they're betting that people prefer "democracy on rails" to the sometimes scary or frustrating life in actual freedom.

(Oh, and the EU is obviously perfectly democratic, that just doesn't depend on your or anybody's (populous does not recognize...) opinion)

I'm unconvinced that a "loss" of democracy is a direction we're headed in. While I agree the points you raise are troubling, I can't find the trend line:

-Convention machinations to get someone elected are certainly nothing new. And a statement like "The public needed Russia" to shine a light on these machinations, in the context of this being an example of a bad direction, implies... that previously, these machinations came to light on their own?

-Similarly, with respect to the unpopularity of the EU, it's the unpopularity that's new, not the EU. And I think it's hard to say if Euroskepticism over the past 5-6 years is due to the Treaty of Lisbon more than broader economic uncertainty. Is the EU gaining power, or do people just like it less?

I don't want to have too Whiggish a conception of history, but I think there's a big difference between "The world isn't as democratic as it should be" and "The world is getting less democratic," and I keep finding it hard to find evidence for the latter.

Good points re economic instability as a driver for a -feeling- of less democracy and the distinction between wish and situation. Thank you.

With regards to the DNC revelations, I'm not sure it's so much a new development, as a reversion to old Tammany Hall style machine politics. - not that I'm entirely sure that the machine wasn't employing those tactics in all the intervening years, just perhaps doing so less blatantly and covering their tracks better. Now, though, the sordid deals are not getting brokered face-to-face in smoky back rooms or over mostly untraceable phone conversations, but are leaving digital footprints that can't easily be scrubbed by the politically, if not technically, adept.

If you read Megan McArdle, her hypothesis is that parties have to resort to these mechanics as they no longer have more overt methods of controlling members.

Brexit isn't quite a counter example until they invoke Article 50, before then it's unclear whether the will of the people will be respected.

The will of the people is unclear, was unclear, and probably will be unclear for quite some time. A result so close to 50-50 is a coin toss, that's not the will of the people. That's a clear sign that it's a complex issue, more questions (more data) should be in order.

But no, let's divine the will of the people from tealeaves instead.

Well, at 52-48, it's clearly more the will of the people to leave. Not massively so, but a bit more than to remain.

Now, what do you do with that? Britain could have required some level of majority before making that change (60-40? 67-33? 75-25?), but they didn't. On the other hand, they could have made it a binding referendum, and if I understand correctly, they didn't do that, either.

But one of the big reasons people wanted to leave "the unpopular and undemocratic European Union" (as wjnc said), was that when people voted "the wrong way" (as determined by Brussels), that vote got ignored. If this vote gets ignored/sidelined/not implemented somehow, for the 52%, that's going to be pouring gasoline on a fire.

No, that's noise, that's "so close to 50-50", it's ridiculous that we're even talking about it.

Even if most of the voters give their best effort to think this through, for a lot of them that wasn't much, other than what UKIP barfed into the air and into their minds. Now a lot of them are having second thoughts.

I do not understand this comment. It would be a coin toss if we were talking about random chance, but nobody flips a coin when going into a voting booth.

All that can be truthfully said is that N people wanted to stay, and N + Y wanted to leave, where Y is a small number. One of the negative sides of democracy - sometimes more people wind up disappointed than others, but the only thing that matters at the end of the day is 50% plus one person.

I think the point is that it's unclear what a leave vote means - particularly in regards to EEA/Single Market membership etc.

The Russian hacker meme hasn't been proven in any way.

Until substantiated it's just a way for the DNC to deflect from the corruption, 'Russia wants you to vote Republican, don't fall for it'.

Not proven in any way? I guess if you want to completely disregard US intelligence agencies. Are you asking to see their proof? This would imply the agencies are part of some conspiracy.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/us/politics/spy-agency-...?

US intelligence agencies are definitely part of multiple conspiracies.

I don't find them particularly reliable. Their heads perjured themselves in front of Congress not long ago, let's not forget.

I guess you blindly follow them.

The Elites have decided that the "commoners" are too stupid to be trusted with actual decision making. They let us play at democracy, the way you might let a child play with Legos, but the real power and decision-making has always been behind closed doors. It's not new, it's just that we are more aware of it now. The Internet and fast flow of information changed the game and the political systems are slow to adapt.

I only see real Democracy working in small, relatively wealthy and homogeneous countries. As soon as you go >X for some value of X where X is the population size, it starts to rapidly fall apart.

Maybe too many people introduce too much chaos and political structures hate chaos. More than that, the markets hate chaos. If you let the people actually control things, you introduce the potential for rapid change, instability, etc, all things that Big Money hates.

This is why they want larger governments, single currencies, centralization of power, trans-pacific and trans-atlantic trade treaties - it brings economic and market stability. At the expense of your personal freedoms and often, your economic well-being. A lot of money will be made, yes, too bad most of it will go to the top 1%.

The US political farce this year is a prime example of that - the Republican base finally got fed up, the Democratic base finally got fed up. The UK also finally got fed up.

The Elites and Globalists ultimately have a single message that they keep repeating - Globalization is good, immigration is good, if you disagree - you're a xenophobic racist. Oh, you're a blue-collar worker and globalization and immigration actually end up destroying your town's economy - too bad, maybe you should have been a banker or software engineer or bio-med researcher! How silly of you to not be one of those three things!

So yes, the GDP keeps growing, economists are happy, but you're not seeing any of the benefits. Housing is getting more and more expensive and your salary is stagnating and all the Elites keep telling you is that this in your best interest, and is, in fact, the only way to move forward. And if you disagree - well, aren't you a silly little backwards out-of-touch country bumpkin?

We haven't even seen the worst of it yet. Automation and smarter AI will keep removing jobs at a break-neck pace, population migration will keep destabilizing countries and what is the end-game to fewer and fewer good jobs and more and more people? Well, we're looking at the results already. Nobody has a back-up plan either.

> The Elites have decided that the "commoners" are too stupid to be trusted with actual decision making… I only see real Democracy working in small, relatively wealthy and homogeneous countries.

It is a scientifically verified truth that we are puny monkeys playing at God. The problem with leaving democracy to small groups is when the small group’s decisions affect the entire world. For example: San Francisco neighborhood associations’ affect on the housing market and technological development.

Another example: The “commoner” reaction to oil prices going back down, first after the OPEC embargo, and now during this weird fracking + Saudi thing. The “elite” Elon Musk is still going ahead with trying to get us off fossil fuels, but the commoner keeps trying to use more.

Learning enough to have an informed position makes you an elite. One problem is there is so little connection between being a political elite and being a smart, benevolent elite. There’s a reason why Obama is seen by Republicans as condescending and dictatorial.

> Oh, you're a blue-collar worker and globalization and immigration actually end up destroying your town's economy - too bad, maybe you should have been a banker or software engineer or bio-med researcher!

Why should you “be” a blue-collar worker, banker, software engineer, or any other job description? You are a human, and you can learn and do anything (modulo actual physical limitations). Lifelong learning is the goal, and research and personal experience suggest that lifelong learning actually gives you better quality of life than the alternatives.

But the US education system is horrible at that. It is shaping and limiting people’s options from the time that they enter elementary school, and are immediately sorted into, oh, you’re bad at math and good at reading, or you’re bad at reading and good at sports.

By and large, globalization has been good. We have more access to stuff and communications than any society in the history of the world. Past performance does not guarantee future results; we are still monkeys playing at God, so globalization can cause problems. When the US is exporting our restrictions on freedoms, for example.

a) Is everyone a monkey playing at God, or are some monkeys more godly than others?

b) What if some monkeys just want to play with bananas? Why should some monkey decide that "lifelong learning" is better for them?

>The public needed Russia (!) for a fresh dosis of unpopular truths

Do people honestly believe that evidence of electoral fraud is some kind of Russian scheme? Those claims strike me as an attempt to deflect the issue by the increasingly embattled affected candidate. That narrative seems to be designed to imply that the revealed wrongdoing is actually worth ignoring.

"Those claims strike me as an attempt to deflect the issue by the increasingly embattled affected candidate."

You're not the only one; attacking the messenger rather than refuting the message seems to be a common tactic among career politicians.

You raise some very valid points here. While I don't think this is a direction more modern, western democracies are heading, I do fear that as mega cities draw in more people, countries and local governments will become less egalitarian - which is what you see beginning to take shape in the U.S.

Is there convincing evidence in this document that the amount of irregularities were actually sufficient to change the result?

I haven't read the entire document yet but have sampled a couple of parts. The exit polls section, by the way, is irresponsibly flawed.

It's well-known that the primary purpose of exit polls in the US is not to audit elections. It's not even to project winners. It's to update demographic models. It's well-known that using the vote count to update an exit poll's model is normal and expected practice, and not evidence of conspiracy. Yes, there have been cases where exit poll divergence has been used as evidence to point out likely fraud. But that only happens when the divergence reaches a certain level, and - this is more key - this determination is made by the exit poll organizations themselves.

Here, in order to believe that exit polling shows evidence of fraud, you'd have to not only believe that the exit poll divergence does not have simpler, alternative explanations, and that the level of divergence goes beyond a reasonable range, but that our exit poll organization - a non-partisan coalition of several different independent news organizations - was aware of it and unanimously chose to suppress the information. This is tinfoil hat territory.

I call it irresponsible because the point of view advanced in this report is willfully ignorant of how exit polls even work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/22/ho...

The conclusion (from pg 95), tldr; Yes:

-----------

Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud. Adding these delegates to Senator Sanders’ pledged delegate total and subtracting the same number from Hillary Clinton’s total would more than erase the 359 pledged delegate gap between the two candidates. EJUSA established the upper estimate through exit polling data, statistical analysis by precinct size, and attention to the details of Democratic proportional awarding of national delegates. Even small changes in vote shares in critical states like Massachusetts and New York could have substantially changed the media narrative surrounding the primaries in ways that would likely have had far reaching consequences for Senator Sanders’ campaign.

Before people take this analysis seriously, they should consider that "Election Justice USA" was established in April 2016 specifically to generate these sorts of analyses to support the Sanders campaign.

> Is there convincing evidence in this document that the amount of irregularities were actually sufficient to change the result?

If an athlete is caught doping, do we question whether they would have won anyway?

In athletics, usually not. But perhaps surprisingly, in the American legal system, yes! The relevant question actually is whether "they would have won anyway".

The standard is that if the prosecution intentionally "cheats" and obtains a conviction through unconstitutional means, the conviction cannot be appealed unless it can be shown that there was a "reasonable probability" that the verdict would have been different without the violation of rights. Worse, in our adversarial system, prosecutors are essentially obligated to argue that any misconduct had no effect. One might even conclude that they are "obligated to cheat".

Ken White, a former prosecutor and legal blogger at Popehat has an excellent explanation of this in his recent piece "Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor". I'm tempted to just quote entire sections from it, but perhaps better just to link to it. If pressed for time, start with the section "Prosecutors Are Duty-Bound to Argue That Rights Don't Matter": http://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-p...

So, while your point is excellent, one might ask whether our voting system should be more like an athletic contest, or a legal proceeding? And if the answer is "like an athletic contest", what does that say about our legal system?

From a layman's perspective, it certainly sounds like the legal system needs to be changed, not replicated.

That's a poor analogy. In statistics you can have an acceptable level of error (called an error rate) where the primary pool of data is still sufficiently accurate enough to be usable.

So say they throw out 5% of the results or give a +/- rate you can measure to the final stats and use that to determine whether or not it was significant enough to warrant a recount or a new measurement. If not then it's probably not worth the time as you can assume the majority party will be satisfied with winning and the losing party would not benefit from a recount.

Additionally, the bar would have to be extremely high that the likelyhood it coulld affect the outcome of the results given the extremely high cost involved in doing the data collection or analysis over again.

So, basically, the OP made a fair point.

Whether or not society should be okay with the level of irregularity and fraud is another question. Even if it didn't ultimately affect the results, that doesn't change the morality or questions of legal responsibility of those who manipulated the results.

The following comment is rather speculative, but I'm laying out a potential argument to demonstrate that there can be second-order effects beyond the questioned voting districts.

• There were emails in the DNC leaks that hinted at a suspiciously cozy relationship between the party and media organizations.

• During the DNC primary process, media reports often included superdelegates in Hillary's delegate count, making Bernie's case seem impossible. Media often failed to even mention the existence of Bernie Sanders in many cases, or calling him "unelectable" even while he was polling ahead of Hillary or Trump.

• In prior elections, some news channels may have gone as far as not even listing a second-place candidate they don't like in poll numbers.

• Voters can be influenced by a belief that their vote will be wasted by voting for someone who is not a "sure thing".

• Therefore, (assuming) the media manipulation or incompetence, DNC bias in favor of Hillary, and vote manipulation to give the impression of momentum to Hillary, even an insufficient number of delegates won by "cheating" could have swayed the election by second-order effects.

Does any other country have a 'primary' system like the US? In Australia there is no pretending to elect candidates for each party. In our recent election we had two choices for PM from the major parties, chosen by the parties themselves.

In the US you spent a year choosing your candidates, but behind closed doors one of those parties spent all their time trying to push one candidate whilst the other party spent all their time trying to stop another.

The Australian system seems a little more honest, even though the roles of PM and President are quite different. We can elect a PM and the party can then choose to throw them out the week after. This happens frequently.

The U.S., as a system of government, does not actually have a primary system. See if you can find it in the U.S. Constitution--I'll wait while you look.

> In our recent election we had two choices for PM from the major parties, chosen by the parties themselves.

This is what the U.S. has as well. The Democratic "primary" is a private process that is not required by the Constitution or federal law. It is set up and run by private citizens for the benefit of private citizens. It is how the Democratic party chooses its candidate, and it works however the Democratic party says it should work.

Participating in a primary is not like participating in a general election. There is no federal right to be considered for the Democratic candidate for president. There is no federal law that says the Democratic National Committee staff has to provide equitable treatment to any particular candidate or campaign. There is not even a federal requirement that a citizen be permitted to cast a vote at all in a primary.

I am hopeful that one of the results of all this hysteria and lawsuits right now is that the courts will help make that clear to people.

They don't have to participate in state-run primary elections, but if they choose to, they are not allowed to commit election fraud. Primary elections are still elections.

Of course, they don't have to provide equitable treatment to candidates in other ways.

How is a primary similar to a general election? No one is elected to anything in a primary. A primary results only in an advisory signal to a party nominating process, which is privately run. We just saw the Democratic one conclude tonight.

What is the state or federal government interest in how a private organization chooses to endorse a slate of candidates? Will we see lawsuits and government regulations over how the Sierra Club or NRA choose to endorse candidates? Will we see state officials stepping in to run or monitor caucuses or conventions if the state party decides to do that instead of a primary?

Just because a party primary has the same mechanics as a general election, that doesn't necessarily mean it has the same legal status--or that it should. In fact it's arguable that spending state resources to help a group of private citizens decide who to endorse is an example of straight-up corruption and waste of taxpayer money.

I think the Australian system is broken in a different way.

As a fun exercise - review the AU constitution and find all the references to the role of PM.

Sean Kelly writing in TheMonthly(.com.au) recently observed after the last election:

"It’s a mistake to think that there is such a thing as the national will or the voice of the people that is somehow expressed through the electoral process, or that an election result can be construed strictly as approval or disapproval of a set of policies. People vote in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons – personal benefit, an attempt at dispassionate policy assessment, preference for individual politicians, habit – and the number of votes that decide any given election is always a small fraction of the population.

"If there’s one thing this election result has told us, it’s that the appeal of both major parties is still on the decline. Twenty-five percent of voters put neither Liberal nor Labor first; yet collectively they are only represented by 3% of the lower house and perhaps 11% of the senate. (Whether it makes sense to think of them collectively is a separate question.) That’s a quarter of the country who look at parliament and don’t see themselves represented."

From a purely leadership POV, US and AU have the same problem that >50% of people don't want the leader that they have - due primarily to the fixation of a) a single leadership role (bring back the triumvirates! :) and b) two-party politics.

When you're informed you only have two choices - you're probably not in a democracy.

It's a bit strange to think of representation only if your candidate wins. By that definition representatives (PMs, members of the house, house reps, whatever they're called) would stop being representative the moment someone loses against them. And there are a lot of contested electoral districts. (Sadly there are quite a few uncontested ones too.)

The quality of representation is a different matter. But yes, (representative) democracy is broken. Just as any collective policy making strategy that requires an expert majority.

The issue is that the representation in parliament is not proportional to the people. Proportional Repesentation solves this, at the cost of making politics more complex and mushy than just choosing between A and B. As a kid the spectacle of US elections (FPTP-ish) always fascinated me. Now I'm thankful for having a voting system that doesn't have a two-party system as only stable equilibrium.

In the Netherlands a parties candidates are up to the parties themselves, who usually put them up for internal elections. For the bigger parties, these elections are often newsworthy. Some parties experiment by taking suggestions from the outside or even allowing outsiders to vote as well. I don't think the 'primary' system in the US is very special; it is highly newsworthy though.

More than a year, even. And a first-term president is distracted for the last year of their term with that politicking.

Regardless of the pros and cons of the US system, it does seem weird that Mr Head Honcho can end up not being politically aligned with the legislature. So much potential for stalemate, as evidenced by the past six years.

Australia works on a parliamentary system where parties elect their respective candidates directly. The US is a republic, where in theory any citizen should be able to run for the highest office with zero qualifications. Big difference.

The major Canadian political parties hold leadership elections open to party members (indirectly through convention delegates mostly). Party membership is entirely a private undertaking, and generally just requires a small financial contribution and a promise that you don't already belong to another party.

Usually parties have a documented and sort of transparent-ish process, that they undertake, and eventually hold a very well publicized vote/election to elect the nominee.

So far this is exactly the primary process. The difference is that the US one is big. In time and space. It takes many months, and potential nominees know that they are in the race from the first moment, because they know that politics is a lot more about showing up, moving your voters, than being on the ballot. (See the NRA, Church of Scientology, and other religious groups.)

Australia has a system like this now in the Labor party, I believe the UK does too.

Shorten was elected as the Labor party leader by a combined vote of the parliamentary party and party members.

I think this report is excellent. Even for those who don't believe the statistical evidence it provides is conclusive in this case, I think no reasonable person could disagree with the improvements it suggests:

Quoting from page 8:

1) Exclusive use of hand-counted paper ballots in all future US elections.

2) Automatic voter registration with same-day party affiliation switching as a mandatory condition for all elections that are publicly funded.

3) Restoration of voting rights legislation which would ensure adequate access to polling sites.

I wonder why didn't also recommend the replacement of caucuses with primaries, since primaries are clearly more democratic than caucuses.

Reasonable people can oppose same day automatic voter registration if it comes without proper fraud prevention.

Everyone should support adequate access to polling sites, but also understand that there is a level of free access that has in the past allowed and encouraged fraud. I think no reasonable person could disagree that showing an ID is a reasonable requirement for voting.

> I think no reasonable person could disagree that showing an ID is a reasonable requirement for voting.

Ok here is some reasonable disagreement

Voter impersonation is a very rare type of fraud [0] and ID laws tend to make it hard for some but not all voters to vote [1] meaning they don't prevent fraud, they just prevent democrat votes.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com... 1. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/measurin...

Damning. Another report from April, 2016 about fraud in the Democratic primaries favoring Hillary Clinton.

https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-elect...

The only question we should be asking is this. Why do some votes count more than others? The fact that there are delegates, let alone super delegates, is damning. You should always question someone claiming they will "represent" you.

Democracy at its best does not need any systems or hierarchies or even parties. It needs people, all equal, to all vote, and to all be counted. That's it.

I for one am all for mandatory voting, and a mandatory voting national holiday. Those who don't want to vote can vote "null" in protest. And they will feel their voice was heard because it will be. That would be a true democracy and a holiday America would be proud of.

Your claim that direct, popular democracy is the most desirable form is not obvious, and needs to be substantiated.

If democracy is about every American having an equal say, and if our vote is that voice, then there should be nothing standing between an individual and their vote.

There is nothing that can be placed in between you and your voice that will add to what you will say. No system, no bureaucracy, no process, no delegate, nothing. This is a fundamental virtue of communication. Imagine if anything stood between you and the submit button you used to respond? Even if you had to tell someone first who then had to tell me, the message could be tainted. A man-in-the-middle is inherently insecure, whether it's actually a man or anything else. Just my keyboard will give me typos.

I think you are reiterating your claims without demonstrating why these things are true. There are a wide number of issue which require a deep level of research and experience to consider.

It's unfeasible to educate all 150M+ voters to the level where we can be confident their opinion on the question is informed. Absent that, their votes will only measure how the question feels with respect to gut-instinct and common "wisdom". Moreover, it would be a waste of time to have 300M (we need to teach the children too) people all be educated on the minutiae of every public policy. The field of public policy is an actual discipline precisely because it is something that people need to specialize in.

Given questions like,

- what range of broadcasting frequencies should be set aside for public use?

- what should the maximum allowable individual gross income be before one should be required to pay AMT if it exceeds AGI; what about jointly-filing couples?

- what should the agricultural subsidy be for soy and grain farmers?

how do you think the average person is supposed to decide these things?

> how do you think the average person

You're saying not all votes are equal, and that idiots shouldn't get to vote. This violates a basic tenet of democracy. The next step would be to not allow them to speak, because they will contaminate the minds of our good voters. Or better yet, kill them. That's censorship, and genocide, and precisely how they occur even today.

The moment we decide we need to determine who is good enough, we start comparing people. This opens the floodgates of racism, sexism, ageism, elitism, and every -ism under the stars. Democrats will discriminate republicans, and Bloods will discriminate Crips. You of course are free to argue you are none of these things, but now you're saying you're above these people, and so you've just joined the discrimination.

Who is to judge anyone but ourselves?

If democracy is about equal voice, then all these comparisons between people become moot. This is how democracy transcends what any of us think of each other, and that's the beauty of it. And that's why it's better than anything else we've come up with so far.

Granted all of our votes are equal, you are free to attempt to educate the 150M+ voter pool if you so desire. This is what you are free to do, and encouraged to do. Go out and solve the problems you envision, so long as you don't alter our democracy as part of your solution.

That is why the only issue in implementing a true democracy is with the logistics of accounting for our voices. And anything that gets in the way, be it requiring IDs, or delegates, or electoral votes, or districts... all become hindrances to democracy. But the moment anyone tries to manipulate votes, these are the devices they have. This is how they get in between us and our vote. And that is why there is so much of it. It works! People, like you mind you, who have ideas about "how" votes should be counted decide to muck with democracy, and to their credit, they have been successful.

Setting all this aside, what you are advocating is to have a more educated voter pool, which doesn't seem like a bad idea. Backing votes with more brainpower clearly will dictate decisions to be smarter. You will be able to back this statement with evidence, because it is true.

The problem is not with the statement or the desire to design a better democracy. The problem is with everything else. And with all things considered, "equal voice + freedom of speech - violence" still seems like the best equation.

Speak not to change the system but to change people's minds. This already works in America. I can't even name where it works anywhere else. The system is still broken, but only because we don't need 99% of it (and by system I mean voting, not government).

> You're saying not all votes are equal, and that idiots shouldn't get to vote.

How about if you respond to what the GP actually said instead of making up things that they didn't say? It seems to me that what they actually said is that "representative democracy works better for the real people in the real world -- a large percentage of whose time, on average, is and, for maximum personal and social benefit must be, spent on non-public-policy pursuits -- than direct democracy in which every public policy question was directly submitted to the citizenry.

There may be good counterarguments against what was actually said, but the strawman you set up, and the arguments you deploy against that strawman, are not among them.

You're citing what (you think) he said about policy, which is what was off-topic. I was only talking about voting, so I only responded in terms of voting. Not sure why I'm the one being accused of swapping issues here or why you find it worth accusing anyone if you care to add to the discussion, feel free.

I would encourage you to read The Federalist Papers, or any of the other expressions of this centuries-long debate over representative versus direct democracy. Your argument shows none of the nuance that this debate requires.

That's policy and governance. There is also this separate problem of how to count votes regardless of what is being voted on. All I was ever talking about was how votes should be counted, and how our voting system has been tampered with. Why you insist I should be talking about anything else baffles me.

I stick to the topic which is also the topic of the article and someone else intrudes and accuses me of a straw man. SMH.

Uhh, "to count" in the sense of "to assign significance," and not "to enumerate." It's very clear from your original comment that you have a quarrel with representative democracy, and not the physical act of vote counting. But sure, that right there is the source of our disagreement -- the meaning of the word "count."

Hand counting of votes seems like a no-brainer, regardless of whether there was a conspiracy this election.

Agree, we have to make hand counting possible in the first place.

Election Justice USA reporting their site is under attack since reporting their findings. [0]

[0]https://twitter.com/Elect_Justice/status/758376021674561536

At this time, I'm still unable to reach their site.

I found this election cycle interesting from the point of view of a true outsider versus the party ruling clique. It seemed to me the big difference in outcomes was the amount of work done at the grassroots level in previous elections. The party who has had their ruling clique challenged for multiple election cycles had an outsider nominated, as opposed to where the party leadership was much more able to deal with insurgents.

So why didn't any of this conspiracy to rig Diebold machines get referenced in the 20,000 leaked emails?

The last guy that talked about rigged Diebold machines died in a plane crash before testifying. That one should have been investigated just as vigorously as this time.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/22/republican_it_special...

Perhaps because even someone who would engage in and document a conspiracy to break organization rules via email wouldn't be dumb enough to do the same thing with breaking the law.

My guess would be that it was carried out by a different entity, i.e. some sub-faction of the campaign as opposed to occurring at the party level.

Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig Makes 15-Minute Case That U.S. Is Nowhere Near A True Democracy.

https://collegetimes.co/larry-lessig-american-democracy/

Since I haven't written it elsewhere, I'll write up my recent voting experience here. I'm registered as a "No Party Preference" (NPP) vote-by-mail voter living in Contra Costa County, California. As an non-partisan ballot, (logically) that ballot did not include the ability to vote in any presidential primary. But the rules of some parties in California (Democratic, Green, and Libertarian) allow you to vote in their primary as an NPP voter if you exchange your NPP ballot for a "crossover" ballot.

Shortly before the primary election, the California Secretary of State issued a clarifying statement about how the process worked for NPP voters. It included these options for NPP voters who wanted to vote in a primary:

  Contact your county elections office no later than May 31
  to request a [party specific] vote-by-mail ballot... OR

  Bring your vote-by-mail ballot to an early voting location
  or the polls on Election Day and exchange it for a ballot 
  with presidential candidates

  NOTE: If you have lost your original vote-by-mail ballot,
  you will have to vote a provisional ballot at the polls—your 
  vote will still be counted.

http://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advis...

Since I was planning to vote in person anyway, and since I wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, I decided to bring my valid vote-by-mail ballot with me to exchange for a standard non-provisional Democratic party ballot at my assigned polling place.

When I got there (the lobby of the local Catholic church), I waited (briefly) in line, presented my mail-in ballot, and was told that exchanges for Democratic ballots were not being allowed. I mentioned the Secretary of States memo, and was (politely) told by the volunteer at the desk that they they knew nothing of this, and had been instructed that only provisional ballots were to be given.

Not wanting to hold other people up, and not wanting to accept a provisional ballot that would not show up in the end-of-day count, I left my place in line, went outside, and researched my options on my cell phone.

I discovered that indeed, Contra Costa County historically has had a policy of not exchanging mail in NPP ballots for "real" partisan ballots, that the Secretary of State's memo was part of the attempt to make clear that this was against state law, and that the day before the election the County had begrudgingly agreed to temporarily change its policy:

  After hearing reports of Contra Costa County’s practice,
  the Secretary of State’s Office contacted local elections
  officials. On Monday, they announced they would change
  their practice and offer these voters replacement ballots.

http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/06/07/contra-costa-county-at-o...

But apparently no one had told the volunteers working at the polls!

So seeing no way to solve this on my own, I went though the line again, and accepted a Democratic "provisional" ballot. I was told that I needed to take the "provisional voting class", and directed to a table with 4 or 5 confused people already seated at it. A few minutes later, another volunteer (elderly, bewildered, apparently having a very hard day) tried unsuccessfully to give us instructions on how to fill out the form on which we were to affirm our identity, electoral status, and reason for requesting a provisional ballot.

Then the volunteer left, and we filled out the forms as best we could. The process was sufficiently confusing that one of the voters gave up and left. After 5 minutes, the volunteer returned, and then mentioned that I wasn't supposed to have filled out the line that said "Reason for requesting provisional ballot", crossed out my complicated answer.

He then went to fetch the actual ballots for us. Most of us filled them out at the table, although I think one person went to a voting booth to do so. A second person gave up at this time. Or maybe they hadn't understood that they were supposed to sign and seal the envelope and drop it in the box on the way out? Or maybe they had to go to the bathroom and planned to return.

Eventually, the volunteer returned and I was told I was told to tear off the "receipt" from the provisional ballot and drop the ballot itself in an official looking bag next to the exit. The instructions on the receipt said that after 30 days, I could check online or by phone to see whether my ballot was accepted.

I came home, and immediately filled out and faxed a Voter Complaint form, which I hoped the State would be sympathetic too as the County was directly disobeying their directives and failing to uphold their agreement: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/additional-elections-informa...

I never heard back any followup from the complaint. I've checked online several times, but 45 days later it still shows up as "No ballot found". That's right, so far as I can tell my vote was neither counted nor rejected, just lost. I might try phoning or going in person to see if I can learn more, but at this point I feel it's a lost cause.

Edit: I should point out that I don't blame the volunteers --- they were poorly trained, and doing as they are told. But why are we relying on poorly trained volunteers for our elections? I do blame the County, since they failed to follow through on their pledge to the State and the press, but assume this is mostly poor communication rather than any specific ill-intent.

> [...] why are we relying on poorly trained volunteers for our elections?

This deserves more attention. I encourage anybody with enough spare time to work a poll at least once (they typically pay you and cover commute costs).

Usually the people training volunteers were never properly trained themselves and, in my experience, responsibilities are delegated emphasizing fairness over merit.

The last poll I worked at had volunteers check in voters using some clunky software on an old laptop. It quickly became clear that none of the volunteers used (or perhaps even owned) a computer and, as a result, check-in was a disaster. I offered to take over or re-train them on how to use the software, but no -- it was my turn to hand out "I Voted!" stickers and I had to wait my turn to work the check-in station.

> I'm registered as a "No Party Preference" (NPP) vote-by-mail

Could you explain this to a Brit? I'm interpreting your statement as when you register to vote that you have to indicate which party you prefer - is this really true?

If so, are you allowed to vote for the other party?

American voters have the possibility to register as Democrat, Republican, Green, another party of their choice or none (NPP). Depending on the voter's State and which party he intends to support during the primary process, the voter may or may not be required to be registered under a specific party preference in order to vote during the primary.

For example, the Democratic New York primary is a closed primary which means only voters registered as Democrats have the right to vote. However, the Democratic Californian primary is an open primary which allows voters registered as Democrats or as NPP to vote.

Voters can change their party preference at any time but they may be required to be registered under a specific party for a certain period of time in order to be given the right to vote in some States. For instance, in order to vote in New York you needed to be a registered Democrat for the past 6 months prior to the election date. This is a disadvantage to candidates who are well supported by independent voters (NPP) as many of them did not change their registration on time. That said, these rules are those of the party and while they can be considered unfair, this doesn't qualify for election fraud.

An election fraud tactic the report mentions is "registration tampering" which consists in switching the registration of voters without their consent and knowledge in order to suppress their right to vote. There have been numerous reports of registration tampering across most States with voters being switched from Democrats to Republicans or from Democrats to NPP and so on. Registrations seem to have been switch electronically (change in the database) some even involving forged signatures.

Note that registering as a particular party depends on the state, and not all of them do it. Here in Virginia, for example, there isn't even an option to indicate party preference.

There are basically two kinds of elections in the US:

General elections are public elections in which anybody who meets certain requirements and is willing to invest the effort can run. As a public election any voter can vote for any candidate. If the candidate has been nominated by a political party, that party will be indicated on the ballot (and most Americans simply vote or the candidate nominated by their party of choice).

Primary elections are basically a private affair undertaken by a political party in order to choose a candidate who they will nominate for a general election. Primaries are facilitated by the public voting system and tend to be influenced by lots of state laws, but most of the specific rules governing a primary are left to the political party (and sometimes delegated to that party's state level organizations).

So parties get to make all kinds of rules about their primaries. In many states (it is subject to state law) parties limit participation in their primary to their members, or more often they disallow members of other parties (but allow someone who hasn't declared a party affiliation). The theory seems to be that this makes it more difficult for one party to ask their members to vote in another party's primary, in an attempt to nominate a candidate who wouldn't be viable in the general election.

Yes, Americans in most states indicate their party affiliation when they register to vote. This doesn't affect who they are allowed to vote for in the official "General Election" that actually chooses who wins the election, but sometimes does affect whether one is allowed to vote in the "Primary Election" held by the individual political parties to determine who their candidate will be.

The confusing part is that the "Primary Elections" (which are held according to the rules of the party) are often run by the counties according to state rules, and are combined with other local elections that are open to all registered voters. Some parties in some states only allow those registered as belonging to their party to vote in their primary, while others allow "unaffiliated" voters to participate. The result is an mish-mash of private party rules and official state rules.

Party affiliation and primary elections have an odd semi-official status. Statistically, a little over 2/3 of the otherwise eligible voters are "registered to vote". Of these, about 1/3 are registered as belonging to the Democratic Party, about 1/3 are registered to the Republican Party, and about 1/3 are "unaffiliated". Something less than 5% of voters are registered with a "third party", and in recent history candidates from these parties haven't played much of a role except as a "spoiler".

Anyway, the current situation is that both Republican and Democratic parties have just officially chosen their candidates. The Republicans have allowed the public to "democratically" chose Donald Trump, much to the distress of many prominent members of the party who feel he does not espouse their values. The Democrat Party has chosen Hillary Clinton, but many (including many supporters of Bernie Sanders) feel she was actually selected by the party as their nominee well in advance, and that the "Primary Election" was being treated as a formality rather than a selection process.

The "General Election" for President happens this November 2016. All registered voters are allowed to vote for whomever they choose at this point. They can even write in candidates who do not appear on the ballot. But unless something unexpected happens to Clinton or Trump before then (or unless this is finally the year that a 3rd Party candidate breaks through) one of them will be elected to office at that point, and will begin serving in January 2017.

Party declaration in the primary is public record. If you hold a politically sensitive job, and your state requires a declaration of party affiliation, you might not be able to safely vote as you please in the primary, because your employer might examine the voter rolls and use parallel constructions to fire the people with the "wrong" party affiliation.

All the adults in my family felt the fix was in for Clinton since 2008, as we assumed that she made a deal with the DNC regarding Obama's candidacy. If he lost, she would go ahead in 2012, and if he won, she'd go in 2016. So now it's 2016. I presume that the Clintons and the DNC have mutually-assured destruction levels of dirt on each other by now, so they must honor their deal. We never had any expectation whatsoever that any other candidate would get a fair shake. Nothing that has occurred since 2008 obviously contradicts the hypothesis. Secretary of state is #5 in the line of emergency presidential succession, and a perfect resume-builder for someone who didn't snag an elected office during the previous cycle.

We suspected that O'Malley was offered something in exchange for being Clinton's foil through primary season, and that he was able to bow out early, because former independent Sanders stepped in to fill his role as the token opposition, blissfully unaware as a party outsider that the fix was already in.

I am even now unconvinced that D. Trump was not a secret co-conspirator in the President Hillary Clinton plan. I'm not sure anyone expected the R party to actually select him, either.

> But why are we relying on poorly trained volunteers for our elections?

Poorly-trained is a problem. But when I go to vote (I'm in the US), I see the polling place guarded by little old ladies. It always amazes me a little bit. It's such a nice contrast to what I see in the news, where some countries have to guard their polling places with soldiers.

Most everyone else is working and volunteers are often actually temporary employees, which is another reason little old ladies take the responsibility on. They're living on fixed incomes and a little bit of extra cash is always welcome.

This is unacceptable. How can you be proud of cheating to win?

My view of this is evolving, particularly in the context of a Presidential election.

There is zero fair play at that level of politics, and if you have been coddled on your path to that chair in any way, including expectations of the orderly and fair appraisal of the absolute merits of your platform, you are unprepared.

I'm saying that Clinton, with all her party machinations, is proving that she understands and has controls over real levers of power, which in turn, suggests she is capable of operating at the level required for that position.

Sanders came in expecting a fair fight, and that's completely unrealistic, naive, little league politics. If you can't survive your party's nominating process, whatever that is, you are a light snack for the players at that level.

> Sanders came in expecting a fair fight

There are two senses of "expect", one about factual expectations (what you think will happen) and one about moral expectations (what you think should happen). There is plenty of efforts from Sanders efforts to impose accountability from very early on for variously ways the DNC seemed to be putting its finger on the scale that Sanders "expected" a fair fight in the second sense, and was prepared to fight to make the fight as fair as possible.

There's zero evidence I can see that Sanders "expected" a fair fight in the first sense, which is what you seem to be suggesting.

Can you not understand why people will do whatever it takes to get a shot at controlling the largest amount of nuclear weapons, the reserve currency that powers the world economy, the most technologically advanced military in world history, the world's most influential fourth/fifth estate, massive trade flows between 180+ nations, and unlimited impunity with the power to pardon anyone in your inner circle?

It's the kind of power where, upon victory, you can erase how you won.

As long as the constituency is ultimately unwilling to hold anybody responsible after the fact... it may suck, but its still a winning strategy.

The crux of the problem is that the majority of the voting public has been conditioned to treat their politics religiously. When people are organized as such, the diocese can do whatever it wants and label the collateral damage as heresy.

Perhaps the Russians were involved.LOL! http://blogosqarteam.typepad.com/.a/6a0148c7b55aa3970c019b02...

Not to sound like a conspiracy nut but this just reinforces the idea of a corrupt (if not idiotic) US voting/election system.

Well, the "system" might be corrupt and idiotic, but remember that this process is run by the Democratic Party itself. If they wanted to implement a system without delegates and super-delegates and mega-ultra-plus delegates, they could do so next week without requiring any involvement by the Federal or State governments. (Short of informing the State governments who manage the ballots about the new rules.)

Keep in mind that what you're seeing in this article is a relatively small and independent part of "the system".

> Not to sound like a conspiracy nut

The fact that you have to state that after being given this whole bunch of good evidence is a big part of the problem.

Well the way the America is currently going, I am not sure any amount of good factual evidence will matter.

I think John Oliver described it best in his video a couple of days back. People seem to be motivated by feelings, not facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdkrtfZP8I

> motivated by feelings

While it was written for the creationism/evolution argument, this[1] article is one of the better descriptions of this mode of thought.

While the typical HN reader uses language to convey ideas, to the creationist or the RNC attendees on John Oliver's show language instead is used first for phatic expression and social hierarchy. This is a language barrier; one side argues facts, while the other side defers to authority and feelings. Before any real communication can happen between the two sides, you first have to solve the language barrier.

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...

Exactly. Another example of this was that debate a while ago between Ken Ham and Bill Nye the science guy, about evolution vs. creationism. No one actually "won" the debate; both sides claimed their guy won, because they were both speaking different languages. Nye spoke the language of science and everyone who has a scientific viewpoint of the world thought he won, whereas Ham spoke the language of fundamentalist religion and everyone who has that viewpoint thought he won.

Sadly, what's even worse, is as I was reading this, I wondered if it might be an attempt to undermine the Democratic Party. The barrier for determining the origin of their funding and the organizational composition of the group is also high enough that I don't know how to figure out trustworthiness...

The problem is, there are a lot of procedures for selecting electorates, and sometimes these are completely inadequate antiquated shitshows, but that's what the rules are, and they are yet another layer of aggregation and transformation that filters and distorts the "will of the people". And a lot of folks think that it's a conspiracy [that Bernie lost]. Well, no, it's a fucked up (broken?) system.

And of course this does not mean that there was no collusion between DNC and the Hillary campaign, and so on.

Amen!

Take a look around the world, even North Korea is a democracy. Everyone has it, you're not so special to have a democracy.

North Korea is run by a dictator. That is not a democratic arrangement. Just because a dictator says it's a democracy does not make it so!

And now we know that the United States is also not what it claims to be.

Sad.

How exactly does the flagging work?

I've detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173595 and marked it off-topic so as not to distract from the thread.

The way flagging works is that users click the 'flag' link that appears after the timestamp underneath a story title. A user needs a small amount of karma (31 or more) before such links appear. Flags have a number of effects, one of which is to downweight a story so that it is more likely to fall in rank. If there are enough flags on a story, the software will eventually kill it (close it to new comments and hide it from users except those with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile).

The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story.

Flagging of comments is important, too. If you see a comment that breaks the HN guidelines, such as by being uncivil, you should flag it. But there's one extra hoop to jump through in the comment case: you have to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. That's a speed bump to dampen impulsive flagging.

Ok, that was creepy. I was wondering if I was crazy and if had just commented or not. Thanks for the insight. Is the HN team considering open sourcing more of HN given all the recent changes?

Sorry. Our experience is that off-topic meta discussions quickly get out of hand, most of all on divisive threads (which a partisan political thread certainly is). To stave that off I detached your comment right away, but it took time to give you a detailed reply.

this is not my thread, but I - and I think probably many other users - do appreciate the increased process transparency on HN, and the clarity and alacrity of decision explanations. Even if people should disagree with some decisions, at least they know what the official positions are. I look forward to more of this increased community information, responsivity and engagement as much as is feasible. Thank you.

You're welcome, and I hope everyone realizes that they can get answers by emailing hn@ycombinator.com as well. Posting on the site is hit and miss, but we see all the emails.

I wonder if this might be less necessary with the new collapse and uncollapse features? People can collapse any threads they deem off-topic

The link suddenly disappeared from the homepage while trending...

It's a rigged system that's the way it's supposed to work.

Either you overcome the rigging, or you STFU and unify with the corruption. As Sarah Silverman would say, stop being ridiculous.

Besides, what are you going to do about it? Vote for Trump?

Never underestimate the power of "stick it to the man".

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/ he has some good points.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, has some amazing analysis of why he thinks Trump will win: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/136818042136/trump-and-climate-...

Why is that amazing?

Ok that article is a bad example.

Here is a better example (ignore the cheesy setup, the actual analysis is very insightful into Trump's media manipulation tactics):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55NxKENplG4

If you look at his blog posts written during the primary, he was saying quite early that Trump would win also.

Thankfully for Hillary, electronic machines will be flipping some votes in her favor. Will this be enough though?

Quite typical for the mods to delete this. After all, wouldn't want word to get out that YC's political friends are crooks.

The only thing moderators did to this post is turn off the flags on it so it would go back on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173595). We did that in response to emails: polite emails, I might add, making the case for the article and the thread. Had you written a polite email instead of posting a drive-by (and completely bogus) attack, you could have contributed to that outcome yourself.

One good thing came of this. When I read your comment, it occurred to me to add "Presume good faith" to our provisional list of new HN guidelines.

This post was flagged by users and not touched by mods. That's why most posts drop in rank from the front page.

The irony of hosting this all on Clinton financing Google.

in for nearly $1m

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com